


forsaking all others

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: Old Kingdom - Garth Nix
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-19
Updated: 2016-01-19
Packaged: 2018-05-15 00:07:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5764234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Magistrix Greenwood's curiosity about Old Kingdom wedding ceremonies is as much about etiquette as it is about ethnography.</p>
            </blockquote>





	forsaking all others

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lunarium](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lunarium/gifts).



> A fandom-stocking ficlet for som-fics/Scribe-of-Mirrormere. :)

Magistrix Greenwood took Sabriel aside as soon as Sabriel was well enough to walk, halting and sore, around Wyverley College's devastated grounds, Touchstone hovering at her elbow almost obsessively and catching her when she stumbled over her own feet. He limped, his leg not yet truly healed, but he walked, and he was not the worst wounded - in fact, he was turning out to be amazingly resilient for a man whose half-brother had tried to kill him, before meeting a final binding at Sabriel's hands. Mrs Umbrade was still spending most of her time in her room, clutching at a restorative vinaigrette and staring at the ceiling; she had yet to recover from the battle, or from the last effects of an episode of hysterics that left her unable to speak to Sabriel beyond a few words of half-grateful half-horrified praise for her defeat of the creature that had ravaged her school.

 

It was sad, Sabriel thought, following Magistrix Greenwood to the old familiar classroom. She had always been one of the headmistress's particular protégées. Her and Ellimere and Sulyn, and Ellimere was dead, and Sulyn was in hospital, and Sabriel herself was... changed.

 

The classroom's heavy wooden door shut firmly behind her and her old teacher, and Sabriel came back to herself with a start. If she didn't focus her eyes, she could almost see the rows of bent heads memorising Charter marks from books and careful written practice, or the desks cleared to the sides of the room when they drew or spoke them for real, gold fire spilling from their hands and mouths, the windows wide open to catch the breeze from north of the Wall.

 

Sabriel focussed her eyes and looked at Magistrix Greenwood. "You wanted to speak to me," she said, when she realised that her teacher wasn't just going to speak.

 

"You were lost in thought," Magistrix Greenwood replied, and her head tilted sideways, bird-like, her always-bright eyes sharp. "Thinking of your young man?"

 

"No, actually," Sabriel said. She opened her mouth to speak her friends' names, but the words stuck. She gestured at the empty classroom instead. "Remembering," she said with some difficulty, and added: "Touchstone isn't my young man."

 

"What is he, then? Besides your King." Magistrix Greenwood leant against a student desk; gratefully, Sabriel sank into a chair. "Will they crown him as King Touchstone?"

 

"I - oh, Charter, I don't know." Sabriel pushed a sweeping wing of her black hair behind her ear. "He does have another name. I think he prefers the one he has now. I have no idea why." She shifted to get comfortable on the hard wooden chair. "As for what he is to me, he calls himself my sworn sword."

 

"Are you going to marry him?" Magistrix Greenwood asked, straightforward as ever. Sabriel blinked at her, startled, and Magistrix Greenwood sighed shortly. "That boy looks at you like you are the finest silver and the fiercest sun, all wrapped into one. You can't have failed to notice. There has been a great deal of romantic sighing from our younger girls. On which note, please do take care to make sure you aren't observed, if you insist on canoodling on school grounds."

 

Sabriel flushed bright red, and her hands curled in the fabric of her skirt. "We've only _kissed_!" And a little more than that, she admitted in the privacy of her own head, but she was sure no-one had seen: it had been pitch black, and she had been alone with Touchstone in the room she once shared with Sulyn and Ellimere.

 

"Mm," Magistrix Greenwood said, in the tones of a woman who was completely unconvinced. "What are the Old Kingdom's traditions with regard to marriage?"

 

"I... don't know," Sabriel said, feeling weak and foolish and as if she'd done something she ought not to have done, a creeping sense of guilt she associated with other girls being reprimanded for excessively free behaviour with gentleman visitors, or too-short, too-tight skirts. "I know there's hand-fasting, which - you bind your hands with ribbon over a Charter stone and say the words. We've done that, we did it the first day I was awake again, though we didn't have a Charter stone." She coughed and looked away, remembering her pale shaking hands in his and the way he'd held them, as delicate as if they were fragile china, thin as fallen leaves. "That bothered Touchstone."

 

"Really," Magistrix Greenwood said.

 

Sabriel caught her bright eyes. "He likes things to be done properly." He did, and so did she; but he wouldn't touch her properly without the commitment, curiously skittish in a way he hadn't been when they were facing almost certain death, and she'd needed to be held and comforted without having to make the first move. So she'd insisted, and persuaded, and wheedled, and finally won when she'd said that the truth of the promise was in their honesty, not the scenery. "It's not permanent, it's - a little like an engagement, a statement of intention."

 

The door opened behind Sabriel; squirming under her teacher's pointed looks she didn't turn. "So when can we expect to hear of a wedding?" Magistrix Greenwood said.

 

Touchstone cleared his throat. Sabriel jumped, and clutched her side in pain; there were quick halting footsteps behind her and then one of his warm hands laid questioning on her shoulder. She reached up to catch his hand and squeeze it in reassurance, and left her head bow, hair falling forward to hide her burning cheeks.

 

"Hand-fasting is traditionally a year long," Touchstone said to Magistrix Greenwood, voice gathering certainty with each word. "I thought we might ask the Daughters of the Clayr to carry out the ceremony at the end of the year's grace. The ceremony was - usually a family elder, or a close older friend, would carry it out. And neither of us has any family left."

 

There was a short pause. "Daughters of the Clayr?" Magistrix Greenwood asked, interest in propriety temporarily overtaken by her fascination with the Old Kingdom.

 

"Seers," Sabriel said to her knees. Her fingers were still twisted tightly around Touchstone's. "Very, very distant cousins. Sort of."

 

"They could marry a king? What about the politics of a royal wedding?"

 

"Their status would make it beyond question." Touchstone coughed awkwardly. "Assuming Sabriel still wants to marry me - in a year's time."

 

"I - well," Sabriel said helplessly, and her fingers clung to Touchstone's, tighter even than before. "I'm sure I will."

 

They stared at each other.

 

 "Why did you come looking for me?" she asked eventually.

 

"There's a man from the Wall asking for you."

 

"Oh," said Sabriel, "I'd better-" and she tried, painfully, to rise.

 

"Let me help you," Touchstone said, hurrying to lift her to her feet, his hands achingly careful with her.

 

"Yes," Sabriel said, letting him pull her up and steady her, and it wasn't the proposal she'd dreamed of, it wasn't one she thought Touchstone had intended to make, but it was the one she meant to treasure; and going by the look on the faces of the schoolgirls outside it would be all over the school in minutes, repeated and recalled and sighed over.

 

Sabriel kissed Touchstone openly at dinner, before he escorted her to her room, just to give them something else to sigh over.

 

Magistrix Greenwood hid her smile in her napkin.


End file.
